Reverse Fiscal Year End Close

This #TipTuesday discusses the feature introduced in GP 2013 R2, the ability to reverse a Fiscal year-end close (i.e. re-open a closed fiscal year).

Generally speaking, there should be very few reasons why this is necessary in the first place, as you have the ability to post to the previous (most recent) closed year already, which I hope most people are aware of. However, there are a couple of situations where I can see this occurring:

Some event requiring restatement of a year prior to the most recent closed year. Other than adjusting opening retained earnings, you could re-open the year to post exactly where you want this entry done and then re-close.

Fixing issues where GL accounts were set up with the wrong posting type!

Overview

This feature really is a simple as it sounds, although before you rush out to try it, I definitely recommend doing this in your test company or environment first, and checking your financial results very carefully before and after you open and re-close the year. I have not done extensive testing on this yet other than in Fabrikam!

To re-open a historical year, go to the Year End Close window, and on the bottom left corner there is a button labelled “Reverse Historical Year”.

If you click on that, this window has very minimal info in it, since all you would do is click on Process to re-open that year. There is no year selection as you have to re-open years in sequential order!

Why this is useful

If you take the example of closing a year without realizing some GL accounts were set to the wrong posting type, this is one scenario, not all that uncommon, where it can really be of use! Here’s a scenario I tested in Fabrikam.

Run a year-end close as normal

I closed 2025 in Fabrikam because it was a year that had some opening balances. Then I ran a simple Summary trial balance for the new year with just my P&L accounts and OOPS, I see one of my P&L accounts has an opening balance. Crap! What happened?

Reverse the 2025 year end close

BEFORE making any changes to the incorrect GL account, I want to reverse the year-end close. I want to reverse it exactly as it was closed. If I had already changed the GL account setting to be correct, I imagine this might screw the results up even further so this part is important: keep the accounts set incorrectly for now!

Fix the account posting types

Now that the fiscal year is open again, I want to fix the GL accounts with the wrong posting type. Here was my poorly set up account, in this case. I changed it to Profit & Loss and saved.

Re-close the 2025 fiscal year

After closing the year again, I re-checked my 2026 Summary trial balance and all looks good.

That was easy! Prior to GP 2013 R2, this KB article had a lengthy and overwhelming set of steps with precise things to do and not do, including some SQL scripts, in order to fix this issue and it was a pain in the butt!

This is the scenario I see this feature being most useful for, in real life.

UPDATE: October 2018

Thanks to Jeff who commented that all users must be out of the system to reverse the fiscal year end. I admit this doesn’t make sense to me and am following up with Microsoft but I have confirmed it does appear to be true, at least on my GP 2016 work environment!

MIND BLOWN. Wow, Jeff, honestly I never tried this as I usually blog from my own test system, one user only. I just confirmed your findings on the “all users need to be out of the system” and have sent it to Microsoft to verify if that is intentional. It does seem very odd! Thanks for pointing this out.

Jeff
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October 4, 2018

I know, right? The only thing I can think of is they want it to be a conscious act, since users would just click through a dialog box that said ‘Are you really REALLY sure you want to reverse the year-end close? For me it’s a pain as we have entities and users around the globe so I need a maintenance window for our entire user community.
Thanks for running this down with Microsoft.